Helen Andrews vs. Evidence: Unpacking the NYT’s “Did Liberal Feminism Ruin the Workplace?”
Watching the goalposts of misogyny shift in real time would be funny if it wasn't so nauseating.
I know, I know—everyone has already written a thinkpiece about this episode. I wasn’t going to add another. But as a historian who focuses on gender, I kept tripping over the same problem: not just what is being claimed, but how. The logic is slippery, the evidence is anecdotal, and the goalposts move. So here’s the major issues I noted in Helen Andrews’ “argument.”
The Problem
If “wokeness” is a specifically female bug that took over institutions when more women arrived, you should be able to define it, measure it, and test whether women’s share actually causes it. Helen Andrews doesn’t do that. Instead, she keeps “wokeness” fuzzy, leans on a few splashy stories, and, when challenged, admits that male-run systems have done the same “witch-hunt” stuff (hello, McCarthyism). That’s not causation; that’s scapegoating.
First things first: name the thing you’re blaming
Plain English: If you can’t define “wokeness” in a way we could all recognize on paper, say, a specific policy or rule, then you can make it mean anything you dislike this week. In the episode, “wokeness” stretches from #MeToo to campus rules to HR culture. That’s too mushy to test.
What would count as proof: Pick a few concrete, trackable indicators (e.g., required DEI statements in hiring, a particular Title IX procedure, a speech code with enforcement). Then say when and where they changed.
Correlation isn’t causation (and timing alone isn’t a theory)
The key move is: as some fields tipped majority-female, “wokeness” surged—therefore feminization caused it. That’s a classic post hoc leap. Lots of things were changing at the same time (social media dynamics, party politics, scandal cycles). Timing by itself doesn’t tell you why.
Anecdotes aren’t datasets
A couple of lawsuits and office legends can’t bear the weight of a sweeping theory. Example: a shipyard case is summarized as “pinups,” until the actual facts include “multiple photos of completely naked women in close-up. The woman had sexist graffiti, and one of her male co-workers thrust his leg in between [the plaintiff’s] legs.” That’s not “she didn’t like posters.” That’s a hostile environment by any reasonable metric.
But Andrews argument only works if she intentionally plays the facts of the case down to make it seem like “wokeness” is the toxic and unreasonable issue in this case and if no one on the podcast had called it out, listeners would have had no idea what she was doing. I’m sure she was steaming with rage that Leah Libresco Sargeant called her out on that. Because the truth is where arguments like the ones Andrews’ uses go to die.
We also get “push-up contests on Wall Street” as proof that the law punishes “male vices” while “female vices” roam free. Except that even as Andrews touts how ridiculous this is, she’s admitted that “some” (the language she uses is important here) women “point to incidents that wewould describe as sexual harassment, that some co-worker grabbed them and kissed them after a drunken work party.”
First off, in my opinion (and legally) that’s sexual assault not sexual harassment. Andrews is already trying to downplay the issue and make it seem less problematic with her language here, which when added to the “some” language makes it seem like it’s just a few whiny women complaining about something silly, versus what it actually is.
Rape culture.
The issue Andrews is missing is that the problems women are citing are not singular, they are additive. Would a push-up contest in the office, by itself, be proof of a discriminatory and sexist environment in the office? Maybe, maybe not. But when that culture is added to the prevailing attitude that male co-workers feel like they can get drunk and grab a female co-worker for a non-consensual kiss without any repercussions, that’s the problem. The issue is an overall culture, not one particular instance.
What I would love to see is Andrews’ citations here. How many of the women that she says complained about push-up contests, actually only complained about push-up contests.
“Toxic femininity” ≠ women; it’s basic human group dysfunction
When Ross Douthat asks what “toxic femininity” actually is, Andrews lists: gossip, avoiding hard conversations, and aversion to direct feedback. That’s not a female pathology; that’s Tuesday at any mediocre workplace. Leah Sargeant says the quiet part out loud: these are not exclusively feminine, and truth-seeking fails in male-dominated places for very familiar reasons, pride, status games, institutional incentives.
Andrews’s “solution” is to sort offices into “masculine-inflected” vs “feminine-inflected” cultures and have fewer lawsuits. That’s not a cure for gossip or conflict avoidance, it’s segregation by vibe. If the behaviors are human, not sexed, repainting the walls blue or pink won’t fix them.
The moving target on “female virtues”
Sargeant presses a basic question: If you can name male virtues and male vices, what are the female virtues, specifically the ones institutions need? Andrews doesn’t answer. She pivots to “it’s a little bit feminine to focus on my likes and dislikes,” then to I don’t write about myself, and never gives a concrete list of institutional virtues women bring. That’s a tell. A theory of “balance” that can only articulate women’s vices isn’t balance; it’s a one-way value ladder.
One might start to question if the issue is that Helen Andrews just doesn’t think women have any virtues. Which, based on how conservatives talk about women, isn’t that much of a stretch.
Douthat even tries to help by offering “care/communitarian spirit” as a candidate virtue, and asks the obvious follow-up: how do those show up in a newsroom, a court, a company? Andrews still doesn’t specify payoffs; instead she jumps to Title IX “kangaroo courts” as the real-world face of feminization and hits the siren about importing them into “grown-up” law. That’s not answering the virtues question, that’s rewriting the assignment mid-interview.
If your thesis is yin-yang complementarity, you have to name the yin—clearly—and show where it improves outcomes (e.g., better error-checking, lower churn, higher compliance, tighter patient safety). Otherwise “female virtues” are an empty bucket you only fill with cautionary tales.
“Women historians will stop studying war and economics” (…nope)
Andrews claims that if there are more women in history, we’ll get “more social and feminist history, and a lot less military and economic history.” Speaking as, you know, a historian: women historians study politics, war, and economics every day. What actually changes is what counts as evidence within those fields, supply lines, logistics, care labor, budgets in the household and the barracks. That’s not abandoning war/econ; it’s doing them better by widening the unit of analysis beyond “the general at the map table and the trader at the desk.” The caricature doesn’t survive contact with the discipline.
And when male-coded witch hunts show up? The goalposts move
When Douthat points to McCarthyism as a male-run “witch hunt,” Andrews doesn’t reassess. She reframes it as a “masculine” witch hunt that used loyalty oaths to bring “clarity,” implying the problem was method, not the panic itself. That’s a classic goalpost shift: female-linked panics count for her thesis; male-linked panics are redefined to preserve it. A theory that can’t lose isn’t a theory, it’s a vibe.
Bottom line
If the worry is witch-hunt dynamics, the fix is institutional design (clear standards, transparent process, consistent enforcement, independent review) that constrains everyone, men and women, equally. Not lawsuit-lite pink and blue workplaces. Not pathologizing ordinary human failure as “feminine.” And not a balance theory that forgets to define half the balance.
The Virtues Test (spot goalpost-shifting in real time)
Use this to vet any claim that a group’s “virtues” or “vices” shape institutions.
Name it.
Is the trait defined in plain, observable terms (behaviors, policies), not vibes or stereotypes?
Show the mechanism.
Is there a clear pathway from trait → institutional outcome (who does what, when, how), not just “it feels related”?
Bring evidence, not lore.
Do they show comparative data or patterns across cases (with controls), not one or two splashy anecdotes?
Check symmetry.
Are parallel virtues/vices and counterexamples considered for other groups or contexts using the same standard?
Hold the frame still.
Do definitions and thresholds stay consistent, or do they shift (motte-and-bailey, relabeling) when counterevidence appears?
Falsifiability.
What specific findings would disprove the claim? Are there predictions that could be wrong?
Policy coherence.
Do the proposed fixes address the mechanism without introducing new bias or legal contradictions?
Score it:
6–7 checks: credible, testable theory.
3–5 checks: needs work.
0–2 checks: scapegoat generator.